I am reading a book co-authored by Mark Dever, Richard D. Phillips and Philip G Ryken entitled The Church: One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. Dever wrote the chapter entitled “A Catholic Church” which deals with the concept of the universal church. On page 75, Dever addresses the reluctance of Baptists to believe in a Universal Church. Here’s what he says (emphasis mine):

Let me speak to Baptists particularly for a moment. Some Baptists have had a great reluctance to speak of any universal church at all, other than that final assembly of all the redeemed in heaven. Where does this hesitancy come from? This reluctance has been there not because we have thought that we are the only Christians. We do not think that now, nor have we ever believed it. But there are a few other reasons, each related to the others.

In part, this reluctance has come because of the understanding—common among Protestants—that the nearly universal definition of the church in the New Testament is “congregation.” This was so much taken to be the case that William Tyndale (in his great work which stands behind all of our English translations of the Bible) simply translated ekklesia as “congregation.” This strand of “congregation-only” ecclesiology has survived in various corners of Protestantism, including the nineteenth century Landmark movement among Baptists, a movement that still has strength in many congregations.

Another part of Baptist reluctance to understand the visible church as having a catholic aspect on earth is the underlying assumption of many Christians that a visible church must have a visible organization. In a strange way, the Baptist insistence on the primacy of the congregational understanding of the church has led to our own kind of ecumenism. We share with most other Christians the idea that Christ’s church should be one, and we are confident that it is, and that this unity will one day be manifested perfectly. But before the Lord’s return, we feel that no officers, no organization, no polity has been given to all of that portion of the universal church which happens to be militant (alive) and visible at any one time, except for the officers, organization, and polity of the local congregation. We may cooperate together with other Christians, but no organization of human invention (e.g., popes, general assemblies, or conventions) should be allowed to usurp the biblically mandated authority of the local congregation gathered.

Still a third source of reluctance among Baptists to speak easily of the universal church as encompassing all visible Christian churches has been our difficulty in understanding the existence of true (or at least regular) churches without the practice of baptism (which we understand to be only of believers). We would no sooner admit unbaptized persons to membership than would those of you who are our paedobaptist brothers and sisters; and we have reached different conclusions than you have about what baptism is. These three considerations—or some combination of them—have led some Baptists and other evangelicals to sometimes deny the reality of the universal church anywhere other than in heaven.

But, the hesitations of some evangelicals aside, the New Testament in Matthew 16:18, in Ephesians (1:22—23; 3:10,21; 4:4; 5:23—32) and elsewhere (1 Cor. 10:32; 11:22; 12:28; Col. 1:18, 24; Heb. 12:23), clearly speaks of a church that is not merely local, but universal and catholic. and yet exists not only in the future, but now in this world. It needs no earthly head to create its unity; Christ alone is its head. It is marked by the Word rightly preached, and by baptism and the Lord’s Supper rightly administered to believers (and, some would say, to their children). It is this church—the universal church—and no one local church that has inherited the church’s universal mission that Christ set out in Matthew 28.